The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for handwritten character recognition in which handwritten characters are recognized on the basis of a recognition dictionary.
Conventionally, in a handwritten character recognizing apparatus, the types of characters to be recognized are prepared from handwritten data of tens of people in order to support stroke orders, numbers of strokes, etc. that differ from user to user, and dictionary data that is referred to by various stroke orders or various numbers of strokes is registered in a recognition dictionary beforehand. Nowadays, there is a tendency to store more and more dictionary data, in order to attain an increased recognition ratio.
However, such an increase in the amount of dictionary data leads to the presence of a large amount of dictionary data corresponding to various stroke orders and various numbers of strokes that are rarely used, resulting in a waste of storage capacity. Further, the trend has been toward an increase in information storage capacity despite the progression of miniaturization of information apparatuses. Thus, there is a demand for a reduction in the amount of useless information to a minimum.
Further, conventionally, the display of a large number of character patterns registered by the user is simply given in the form of a list in which characters are arranged according to the order of registration or the order of character codes, so that it takes some effort to find the intended character from such a list